cancer

I don__ know how,_ I confessed, and I pulled my hand away so I wouldn__ hurt her in my frustration.She grabbed my hand and brought it back, this time pressing it to her heart.____ telling you how. You hold onto me. You trust me. You use me. You lean on me. You rely on me. You let me shelter you. You let me love you. All of you. Cancer. Fear. Sickness. Health. Better. Worse. All of you. And you__l have all of me.

Even now, it's still hard for him to say it. I don't blame him. It's an icky word. Why couldn't whoever was in charge of naming things call cancer 'sugar' and sugar, 'cancer'? People might not eat so much of the stuff then. And it's so much more pleasant to die of sugar.

You are so high in the tree.If you jumpyou will live a full lifewhile falling.You will get marriedto a hummingbirdand raise beautiful part- hummingbirds. You will die of cancerin mid-air. I will not lie. It will be painful. You are a brave little boyor girl.

What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.

Cancer is a bitch that needs to get the crap smacked out of it. I intend to stand on the front lines with a big-ass bat.

Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.

I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

Punching a woman is like punching a one-year old black baby in the face

Any thought which brings with it fear, worry, anxiety etc. should be immediately banished from the mind by replacing such thoughts with self-assuring, positive and energizing thoughts. This is called 'Quantum Mind' and it can work miracles in your life.

But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.

Because really, what do you have to lose? Your life? That's no big deal, I promise you. When you find out you might die, you're finally allowed to live like you never have before. If you lose your life while living the shit out of it, then you've done the best you could, and you shouldn't worry about death. When you're dead, you can't screw up. But while you're here, all you have are a few things to call your own. You have your integrity, your family, and your hope for the future. These are important and you should keep them somewhere safe where you'll remember them.

In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher

She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a __ift,_ was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before__ne that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

The various worms eat one's body after its death; conversely, cancer cells eat one's body, when it breathes, since the failure of medical research.

E.M. Ashford: And death shall be no more" comma "death, thou shalt die." Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting.E.M. Ashford: Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause.E.M. Ashford: In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.

Cancer though, it was a fickle friend that didn't care about your age, gender or race. It would move in take up residence and eventually kick you to the curb, it was a mean landlord and didn't care who it hurt in order to get what it wanted.